Category Archives: BLOG

With Earth heating up and the rollout of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment, there is a real need to bring ethical thinking to bear on discussions of climate change. In response, ISEE has initiated this blog as a service to environmental scholars and concerned citizens who would like to share their insights on climate ethics.

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The Northwestern University Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics (NUSTEP) will be holding its 12th annual conference at Northwestern University on March 8–March 10, 2018. The conference will feature keynote addresses by Niko Kolodny (Berkeley) and Sharon Street (NYU). We are now accepting paper submissions.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: We welcome submissions from faculty and graduate students, as some sessions will be reserved for student presentations. Please submit an essay of approximately 4000 words. Essay topics in all areas of ethical theory and political philosophy will be considered, although some priority will be given to essays that take up themes from the work of Niko Kolodny and Sharon Street: constructivism, evolution and morality, democracy, subordination, domination, epistemic and practical reasons, friendship and love, liberalism, metaethics, political authority, and rationality. Essays should be prepared for blind review in word, rtf, or pdf format.
Graduate submissions should be sent by e-mail to nustep.grad.conference@gmail.com.

By Philip Cafaro
Email:philip.cafaro@colostate.eduWebsite: http://www.philipcafaro.com/
Phil writes on environmental ethics,
consumption and population policy, and
biodiversity preservation. He is the author
of Thoreau’s Living Ethics, and recently
co-edited Life on the Brink: Environmentalists
Confront Population Growth.

Published June 26, 2015

There is a lot to chew on in the Pope’s encyclical released today, LAUDATO SI’, ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME. Having just finished the first chapter (of six), I’d like to call your attention to several particularly intriguing paragraphs below. Continue reading →

Climate change is a moral problem. Each of us causes the emission of greenhouse gas, which spreads around the Earth. Some of it stays in the atmosphere for centuries. It causes harm to people who live far away and to members of future generations. Moreover, the harm we cause, taken together, is very great. As a result of climate change, people are losing their homes to storms and floods, they are losing their livelihoods as their farmland dries up, and they are losing even their lives as tropical diseases climb higher in the mountains of Africa. We should not cause harms like these to other people in order to make life better for ourselves.

It is chiefly for moral reasons that we inhabitants of rich countries should reduce our emissions. Doing so will benefit us—particularly the young among us—to an extent, but most of the benefit will come to the world’s poor and to future generations. Our main reason for working to limit climate change is our moral duty towards those people.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes that climate change is a moral problem or, to use its cautious language, it raises ethical issues. The authors of theIPCC’s recent Fifth Assessment Reporttherefore included two moral philosophers. I am one of them. I recently returned from the Approval Session of IPCC’s Working Group 3 in Berlin. This was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my academic life.

Today is Earth Day, April 22, 2014. Like most Earth Days these days, a few grey-haired environmentalists may take note of the event, celebrities will tweet meaningless platitudes likeDaryl Hannah’s exhortation that we should all “love your mother,”and college students will have celebrations at their campuses emphasizing individual consumer choice and the pursuit of sustainability through better technology. When did Earth Day become so irrelevant?Continue reading →

The National Academy of Sciences and its British counterpart, the Royal Society, have published Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, a very easy to understand primer on the science of greenhouse-driven global warming. Although there is not a lot new in this report as a matter of science, it makes the strong scientific consensus on human-induced climate change that has existed for some time clearer and more accessible for non-scientists particularly on the major issues that need to be understood by policy-makers and interested citizens. The report is written in simple language and filled with pictures and graphs which illustrate why almost all mainstream scientists actually engaged in climate change science are virtually certain that human activity is causing very dangerous climate change. Continue reading →

"Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?" —Henry David Thoreau